My Losing Season (14 page)

O sleep now, Tom, your pen is quelled.
You have a grave to show it.
But I have heard an eagle say
“These mountains need a poet.”

I, of course, had never encountered an eagle who said any such thing, or anything at all. The poem wandered on for three more queasy stanzas until it mercifully ended on a bright, triumphant note of half-baked and completely unearned ecstasy. Not a single member of the Citadel community ever commented on my feverish ode to Thomas Wolfe. It was a stone dropped into torpid waters and made not a single ripple. But my second poem, a bit of doggerel I tossed off one night after a sweat party, gave me my first taste of fame as an author, and I learned the invaluable lesson that fame could be a killing thing, something I am not sure that my literary hero Thomas Wolfe ever learned. For several days, I became the most famous poet in the history of The Citadel when I published these four lines:

The dreams of youth are pleasant dreams,
Of women, vintage, and the sea.
Last night I dreamt I was a dog
Who found an upperclassman tree.

Upperclassmen from all four battalions were kind enough to visit me to discuss my poetry in depth. Not a single one asked me a question about Thomas Wolfe, but all expressed curiosity at my desire to urinate on them. They encouraged my passion for poetry by making me do pushups until I dropped into a pool of my own vomit. My squad sergeant and I engaged in a brief, illuminating discussion of my theory of poetics. A man of few words, he made the eloquent gesture of urinating on my back while I was doing pushups for him. I was barely eighteen, and I had already suffered for my art.

That single poem changed my whole life at The Citadel, the way I was regarded by my classmates and the Corps as a whole. Before its publication, I'd blended in the lower phylum of the Corps of Cadets with the flawless instinct of a chameleon. Playing basketball was the singular mark of my distinction. The poem made me seem much more cocky and daring and risk-taking than I actually was. My classmates in Romeo Company thought I'd taken momentary leave of my senses and that I was to be more pitied than scorned. I didn't regret writing the poem, but had serious reservations about the wisdom of publishing it.

My roommate chuckled every time he read it and said, “You really ran some shit on those guys, Pat. I heard one of them say you're the gauldiest knob in the Corps.”

As a knob, you longed for disengagement and invisibility . . . a “gauldy” knob, with its implication of the renegade and outlaw, was the lowest form of life in the Corps. The Corps prided itself as a hive of conformity for the inspection of outsiders, but allowed its individual members broad access to both strangeness and eccentricities once the barracks gates were shut. The writing of poetry was one of the oddest activities a cadet could indulge in, but for a knob to write a poem so openly disrespectful of the upper classes and to do it for the fall issue of a magazine published at homecoming was unprecedented.

I awaited the worst and the worst finally came. The cadre came for me and for me alone. When they wanted to run a freshman out, they set the pack loose on him. No one knows how he will stand up to the pack when it comes at him in its full fury. I broke easily.

The cadre pulled me into the shower room and eight of them went after me. All eight screamed out conflicting orders at the same time, and when I chose one order to execute, the other seven were all over me, punching me in the chest, in the back, and soon the chaos of pure noise overwhelmed me. One shouted for me to name all the company commanders in the Corps, while another shouted at me to recite the cadet prayer, while another demanded that I recite the guard orders. Even when I was doing pushups, cadre members were down on the floor with me screaming in both ears. In less than ten minutes, the unraveling started and once it did I lost control of everything. When I tried to answer a question, I couldn't find my voice and heard one of them shout triumphantly, “He's cracking! He's cracking!”

They increased the volume of their voices until it seemed that this bedlam of noise and hate was worldwide and my brain was afire and lost and making no connections. Tears streamed down my face, the first sob burst from my chest, and I wept on my knees before them, prostrate, defenseless, as they swarmed all over me, coming in for the kill.

“Gutless fuck. Little baby boy. Cry, little girl. Cry, little girl. Ah, we hurt baby's feelings. Tell us you're quitting, Conroy. Let us know you're quitting, Conroy. We'll walk you to the gate. We'll shake your pussy hands goodbye. Little girl can go home to Mommy. Mommy makes it all nice.”

If I could've spoken, I'd have quit school at that moment; there was nothing I wouldn't have done to end this degradation. But I'd lost all powers of speech and could only sob with my face against the tiles as the storm of their shouting passed over and through me. There was nothing left to save when I heard a disturbance at the door. My seniors had come for me, my four wonderful senior privates, the boys without rank that I'd come to revere came running into that shower room when my roommate told them where I was. Plunkett swung at one of my tormentors and Hough and LaBianco and Keyser pulled me to my feet. Amidst great shouting and cursing they moved me swiftly through the crowd of cadre who pressed forward to have a go at me again. They'd lost me at the very moment I cried uncle, and they knew it. My senior privates had stormed in for the rescue and I'd love them the rest of my life for it.

“You chickenshit fucks keep away from Conroy,” Plunkett warned them at the entrance to my room. “I'll kick the living hell out of anyone who tries to bother him tonight.”

My roommate put me right to bed with great solicitude. I still couldn't control my sobbing and wept through the rest of the evening study period. Periodically, Bob would rise from his desk, come over and squeeze my shoulders and adjust the covers. Gentle and encouraging, the four seniors came over to see how I was doing.

Plunkett said, “It can't get worse than this. You survived the worst of it, kid. Remember, they can't kill you. They went to the limit of what they can do. They're not allowed to kill you.”

LaBianco said, “They'll go for you again tomorrow, Conroy. Get yourself ready for them. Prepare yourself.”

“You'll stand it better next time,” Keyser said. “Pray tonight. Ask for God's help. I'll be praying and as you know, next year I'll be a man of God.”

Mr. Hough said, “Pull it together, Conroy. We can't afford to lose a slave as good as you. We trained you too well.”

Later I would find a piece I had composed in Colonel Goodheart's history class trying to find a way to honor the heroism of my four seniors:

Plunkett and Keyser, LaBianco and Hough
Men of substance and incredible stuff
I could live forever and not thank them enough
Plunkett and Keyser, LaBianco and Hough.

But on the night of my meltdown, at my lowest moment as a brother and ruined plebe, the armors of the brotherhood began to form their secret shells around me, to enfold me into the house where the regiment whispers its softest words to its initiates. The seniors checked up on me all during evening study period. My classmates from R Company sneaked down to my room to offer words of encouragement and solidarity, and to ask me to stay. Robbie Miller came and so did Dennis Webb and Robbie Schear. Mike Devito and Bo Marks came, then John Worrell and Carroll Pinner, Hobie Messervey, Wade Williford, and Charlie Claghorn all came. The boys who'd suffered with me since Hell Night looked in on me, spoke gently to me, comforted me, and tried to ease my suffering, though I couldn't stop myself from weeping. My classmates came and left me a gift in their wake—they sealed forever my desire to be one of them. What I hated most about The Citadel had occurred in that shower room, but what I honored most about it happened in my room when a solid line of head-shaven boys made their way to my bedside to lay the hands of brotherhood upon me. In the plebe system I endured and loathed, I could also feel the weight and shape and great bonding taking place in the darkness. That night my classmates showed they cared for me and they brought the assets of this fire-tested solidarity all night—there is little on earth so fierce and inarticulate and life-changing as the love of boys for other boys. Every plebe who came to my room that night did so illegally, but they came in secret to make one last effort to pull me back into the brotherhood. By the time study period ended at 2230 hours, I'd stopped crying. I washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror. I stared at my image and tried to kill off anything that remained soft in that boy's face.

I walked over to the next room and thanked my seniors for coming to get me. I told them I'd have quit if I could've uttered a word.

“We didn't give a shit about you personally, Conroy,” Plunkett said. “We just didn't want to have to train another dumbhead.”

“You're a smackhead to us, Conroy,” Keyser said. “The scum of the earth.”

“You mean nothing to us personally,” LaBianco said.

“Nothing,” Hough agreed.

“All of you are lying, sirs,” I said. “Thank you again. I'll never forget it, sirs.”

“They'll make another run for you tomorrow, smackhead,” LaBianco warned.

“Be ready for them, Pat,” Plunkett said, the first time an upperclassman had called me by my first name. It was the sound of the brotherhood again, recruiting me back into the house of the regiment.

“I'm ready for them now, sir,” I said. I'd gotten my voice back, and the Red Army couldn't have run me out of school after surviving that one hellish night.

         

T
HEY CAME AT ME ALL THE NEXT DAY.
News of my breakdown circulated through R Company and the cadre made a run at me after breakfast, another at noon formation, and a group took me alone to the shower room after evening mess. Where the night before I broke quickly, I found myself steely and resolute the following night. I chose one order to obey and obeyed it swiftly, no matter how many conflicting commands were shouted. The plebe knowledge that had forsaken me came back in a ceaseless tide, and I answered every question, doing it in the required military manner. Again, their assault was brutal, but I was game for it. There were ten cadets in the shower room with me on the second night, and I got to be friends with some of them the next year. They were good guys whom I enjoyed getting to know, though I'd never agree with their way of breaking plebes or their method of showing belief in “The System.” Two of the cadets in that shower room were loathsome, spiderous boys whom I'd not urinate on today to put out a brushfire along the hairline of their cheap toupees. It was not that they were overzealous in their molding of plebes, it was the maniacal pleasure, carnal in nature, that they brought to the task of ungoverned sadism. My heart skipped with joy the following year when I discovered that their own classmates reviled them as much as I and my brother plebes, and had turned them into outcasts in the barracks.

In the middle of the sweat party, Jimbo Plunkett opened the door and watched me pumping out fifty pushups on the shower room floor. His presence made the cadre nervous after the confrontation the night before.

“You doing all right, dumbhead?” Mr. Plunkett asked me. “Pop off.”

“Sir yes sir,” I shouted.

“You need me, smack?” he asked.

“Sir no sir.”

Plunkett surveyed the room then said, “Assholes,” as he left. It was the last night the R Company cadre ever tried to run me out of The Citadel. I had learned how to hide the smell of my fear. Never once did I lose that fear, but I discovered how to mask its shameful scent.

         

B
EFORE MY FRESHMAN TEAM FACED
E
AST
C
AROLINA
, my teammate Don Biggs asked me to step outside the field house after practice one February night. Don possessed an angelic face on the body of a bruiser. He could mix it up under the boards as well as any player I'd ever seen. He was averaging seventeen points and pulling down fifteen rebounds a game when we walked out beneath the winter stars. Don and I had become extremely close since we returned from Christmas break.

“Pat, I haven't told any of the other guys yet,” Don said. “But my father's driving over from Macon to pick me up tomorrow.”

“You're leaving us, Donnie?” I asked, my voice downcast. “We've been through so much together.”

“This place isn't for me, Pat. I'm a big friendly southern boy, that's all I am. I can't stand this screaming. I'm unhappy here, Pat. I've been unhappy since the first day, and so have you.”

“I certainly have, Donnie,” I said. “I've made no secret of that.”

“My parents said to bring you with me, Pat. You can stay at our house in Macon. We can get jobs, apply to a new school next year.”

“Sounds like heaven, Donnie,” I said. “But I can't go with you.”

“Why? You hate this place like poison.”

“If I leave, my father'll beat the hell out of my mother. Then he'll take it out on my brothers and sisters,” I said.

“I'm so sorry. That's just awful. But you're always welcome to my house in Macon. You'd love my mom and dad. They're the sweetest people.”

“I know their son. I know how sweet they are,” I said.

The plebe system would claim over half of that magnificent freshman team. Craig Fisher, Bill Taflinger, and Dan Coope would follow Biggs out of Lesesne Gate and play out their destinies in other states and other schools. From our original team, Dan Mohr, Jim Halpin, and I were the only survivors who limped our way into our sophomore year. All of us had suffered grievously under the iron reign of the cadres. I'd miss the companionship of Don Biggs for the rest of my life. My freshman team was stunned the next day when they heard news of his departure.